Portrait mode

When I shoot street photography it's usually in landscape mode. Working as a director with video, it became so natural to me that I almost never tilt the camera for portrait mode, not even when I use my iPhone to take some pictures. So when I picked up my old hobby everything was in landscape mode.

But in photography there's an extra dimension. I never thought tilting the camera would give me the desired effect in reflections. Plus, in landscape mode, I get most out of the goods displayed in the shopping window. As I often zoom in to the max at 100mm (200 mm 35 mmm equivalent because of my Olympus ¾'s system) I get the max out of the bokeh effect of my 12-100 mm f4.0 Olympus lens, transforming the shopping window in great out of focus color effects overlaying my subject. 

I really wanted to take advantage of this extra feature, which could never be used when shooting videos for television. When the camera's in mobiles became sort of the standard for taking pictures and videos, we always made fun of people filming in portrait mode. But like everything in life, it evolved and with platforms as Tik Tok it became pretty normal.

So one day I decided to explore the portrait mode in my reflections and started to take pictures of interesting persons passing by. It's more difficult than landscape, because I have to focus all subjects manually and they are passing by pretty quickly at 100mm in the reflection, but it also created a nice dramatic image!

These days when I'm in front of a cool shopping window I always keep an eye on my surroundings and if a person of interest is passing by I quickly flip my camera. But sometimes I also find an awesome filled shopping window (light stores are my favorite), but a really bad reflection. Roadwork, a hideous building across the street or just a bad backdrop. In these cases portrait mode gives me the flexibility to end up with some great images and dramatic models. Next project is going to be some wider shots, which you can find at the cityscapes tab, but that's still work in progress